70 years after Truman dropped the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki another Democratic party president heads a government that is asserting itself in the role of “world policeman.” As in the past, today’s program of modernizing the quadrillion dollar nuclear arsenal of U.S. imperialism and projecting its aggressive armed forces into all corners of the globe is driven by the ambitions of the U.S. multinational corporations. It is driven by their plans to maintain and expand a world empire based on the super-exploitation of the peoples and the plunder of other countries.

The ambitions of U.S. imperialism have enlarged since the end of WWII. In 2015, U.S. imperialism is a world power that has relied on its military superiority to grant itself the right to interfere in the internal affairs of sovereign nations everywhere and to dictate the balance of power in all regions. And even as the State Department sends diplomats to strengthen aggressive alliances and U.S. armed forces are sent to intervene all over the world, Obama and the Republicans alike try to legitimize U.S. war and militarism by equating it with “peacekeeping.”

Today, under the banner of “peacekeeping” the military machine of the U.S. government is mobilized in full-scale wars against the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan. The chauvinist banners of “freedom,” “democracy,” and “human rights” are also used to disguise the aggressive aims of U.S. imperialism in Venezuela, Colombia, the Philippines, Palestine and elsewhere. The U.S. is also blockading Cuba, escalating tensions on the Korean peninsula, intervening in Haiti and preparing for war against Iran. The Obama administration is also telling the people that it is preparing more wars by projecting U.S. military power into Europe, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa. On a global scale, Obama has focused on creating more special units which are “agile, lethal and readily deployable” in order to wage more counter-insurgency and “low-intensity” wars. Obama’s program also continues to include the building and deploying of a new generation of nuclear weaponry.

The way to develop the spontaneous protest movement of the American people against the war program of the Democrats and Republicans is by embracing a proactive peace agenda which aims at ending U.S. intervention and aggression against other countries. In order to advance our struggle for a democratic foreign policy – a policy which ends U.S. militarism, interference and aggression and recognizes the sovereign equality of all peoples, the people need to strengthen their independent political movement against the parties of war and imperialism. This means laying the foundations for a broad, popular front against war and imperialism. It means strengthening our political independence by organizing in opposition to and struggle against the capitalist class and its political parties, the source of militarism and war.